The life and works of author and journalist Olga Masters was celebrated at the Olga Masters Festival at the weekend in Cobargo and Bermagui.
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Olga Lawler was born in Pambula in 1919 and was educated at Cobargo Public School, which she left when she was 15 to work as a journalist with the Cobargo Chronicle.
When she was 18 she left for Sydney, met and married schoolteacher Charles Frederick Masters.
They had seven children, six of whom survive.
She worked as a journalist on the Lismore Chronicle, the Manly Daily and she wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Her first radio play to be bought was Penny Ha-penny Stamp and a short story Call me Pinky won an award at the Sydney Morning Herald.
Her first book, Home Girls, was published in 1982 when she was 63.
In her short writing career Olga won grants and awards for her stories and books and her reputation was growing both in Australia and overseas when she died from a brain tumour in 1986.
At the festival her talented children spoke of their mother's life and work.
She had said “my children are my finest books”.
Her eldest son, Roy, was a school teacher, but became a rugby league coach, sports journalist and sports columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald.
He is also an author.
At the various panel discussions and events over the weekend, it was Roy's skill as a raconteur that had the audience in stitches.
One story was when the family was in a country town in northern NSW which all the family loathed.
He was in sixth class and his father, principal and his teacher, has set an essay for his pupils to describe the town.
He explained his predicament to his mother who immediately dictated the essay for him, describing the view from the verandah in complimentary and descriptive terms, ending up with the sentence, “that’s why I love this town”.
“But Mum, that's bulls***!” Roy said.
“It doesn't matter son, it reads well,” she replied.
Describing her feeling of frustration at being stuck in these country towns in impoverished circumstances Roy remembered an occasion when the inspector came to dinner.
He asked for pepper.
“Pepper,” she cried. “You can't buy pepper on a schoolmaster's salary!”
He said that as a Sydney Morning Herald writer he couldn't wait to collect the paper from the lawn to see where his work was placed and his mother was like that with the Lismore Chronicle and from his mother’s comments he thought the term sub-editor meant sub-normal.
Roy said that she was elated when she won the prize for her short story.
Roy also was told that his mother could never watch the rugby league games he was coaching.
It appears that at St George matches she would be anywhere else than in the room with the television, pacing around the house and the verandah and occasionally asking the score.
Her second son, Ian, is a BBC-trained American broadcaster, journalist, commentator, author, screenwriter and documentary film-maker.
He said that Olga's ambition was to go to the big city and she was frustrated, and felt isolated with the lack of stimulus she found in the country towns they had to live in through Charles’ slow career path.
He too remembers the hospitality of his parents and to come home from school and find bicycles lined up along the fence.
“We didn't know she was an amazing talent waiting to be nurtured,” he said.
Quentin, the third son who was born in 1945, is a director, writer, cinematographer and producer.
He was both writer and producer of A Dangerous Summer and director of Midnight Spares, The Stud and Thumb Tripper.
He feels he got to know his mother well when he returned to Australia in 1964 and lived her for three years or so.
He remembers her getting up at 4am to write and would continue till midday which was when she started cooking and looking after the household.
“Her head was in a good place with her writing, but she still had time to be wonderful grandmother and friend to my wife,” Quentin said.
Both Quentin and Ian were asked if their mother had pushed them to go overseas to further their careers and Quentin said that it was then the natural thing to do to leave Australia as there was not much going in the arts here.
Both of them remember how very much she enjoyed coming to visit them overseas.
Chris Masters, the fourth son born in 1948, is a multi-Walkley award journalist.
He was interviewed in the Cobargo Showground pavilion about the documentary he made for the ABC, The Years That Made Us and its themes.
Those “years that made us” were the ones between the First and Second World War and Chris said “Mum became an emblem of that series as she was born in 1919,” he said.
He described the grinding poverty that the Lawlers lived in.
Even though they lived only 19km from the sea they never saw it as they had no transport.
Chris maintained it wasn't Gallipoli that defined Australia as a nation it was the ordinary people in the years in between the wars who rallied at adversity and laid the foundations of modern Australia.
At first they were stricken by grief as a nation with the losses in the First World War, so many that “it was like Victoria losing the whole town of Ballarat”.
It wasn't only families like Olga's that suffered in those years but those like Charles' who came from the Illawarra, where few had a full-time job.
Having a child in the depression was a curse.
Men were emasculated by not being able to put food on the table and this was a country which up until the First World War was regarded as progressive with a basic wage for what a family needed to support itself.
“The nation felt collectively never again – never again – never again which was why Rudd responded as he did to the financial crisis,” Chris said.
The Masters daughters, Sue and Deb, honoured their mother's memory with a reading of her play, A Clay Family, on Sunday.
Sue is executive producer of drama for SBS but between 1983 and 200 worked for the ABC producing Brides of Christ, Sea Change, the Road to Coorain and Changi.
She then moved to Channel Ten and produced the Secret Life of Us and White Collar Blue.
Chris summed up the family by saying “all Olga's children share a passion for telling a story”.
